Movie notes: Selling ‘Kick-Ass’

Hit Girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) prepares to pound the bad guy (Mark Strong) in “Kick-Ass,” which is more violent than its ad campaign lets on.

I think it was Roger Ebert who wrote that studios often market the movie they wish had been made instead of the movie that was actually made.

That seems to be what’s happening with “Kick-Ass,” the film adaptation of the popular comic book that opens tomorrow. The TV and radio ads make it sound like a fun-loving, action-packed superhero movie crossed with a nerdy-teen comedy, sort of like “Spy Kids” or “The Incredibles” meets “Superbad.” The ad in tomorrow’s Weekender is also in that vein, including touts such as “a roaring blast of energy” from Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers (whose full review I couldn’t find; wanted to check the context) and “thoroughly outrageous and very funny” from someone I’ve never heard of.

The red-band (i.e. restricted) trailer paints an edgier picture, but not a different one. It includes lots of profanity and the title character (Aaron Johnson) getting his ass kicked repeatedly, not to mention being fairly explicit about his sexual fantasies. Plus there’s Chloe Grace Moretz, who’s also in “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” talking dirty as 11-year-old superhero Hit Girl. Which explains the film’s R rating.

Shall I have feelings, or should I pretend to be cool? Will I seem hopelessly square if I find “Kick-Ass” morally reprehensible, and will I appear to have missed the point?

Let’s say you’re a big fan of the original comic book, and you think the movie does it justice. You know what? You inhabit a world I am so very not interested in.

A motion-picture camera makes a record of whatever is placed in front of it, and in this case it shows deadly carnage dished out by an 11-year-old girl, after which an adult man brutally hammers her to within an inch of her life. Blood everywhere.

Now tell me all about the context.

In other words, this is not some borderline R-rated flick like “Its Complicated,” which earned its rating because Steve Martin and Meryl Streep smoked pot. The MPAA disclaimer should be taken seriously  “rated R for strong, brutal violence throughout, pervasive language, sexual content, nudity and some drug use  some involving children.”

This isn’t meant to be some fuddy-duddy warning not to see “Kick-Ass.” It means, as Ebert points out, that you probably shouldn’t take your 6-year-old.

And in fairness, although both Weekender contributing critics, Ebert and the Orlando Sentinel’s Roger Moore, panned “Kick-Ass,” it has a 75 rating on the Tomatometer as of this morning. That may drop as more mainstream critics weigh in  the “Top Critics” section only has 11 reviews, seven of which are positive.

Among the seven was Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman, whose B-plus review called “Kick-Ass” an “enjoyably supercharged and ultraviolent teen-rebel comic-book fantasy.” But he also sounded the parental alarm: “Yet is it a problem that ‘Kick-Ass’ is by far the most violent movie ever to feature kids as heroes? Parents should consider themselves warned, though personally, I just wish that the film had ended up a bit less of an over-the-top action ride.”